According to the iPhone adverts, regardless of what you want to do, “there’s an app for that’. Now, I’ve always been a bit cynical to marketing blurb, especially from the big companies. But having had an iPhone for a while now, I can honestly say, I think that claim may actually be pretty close to the truth. There seems to be a limitless number of apps out there to do just about anything.
It’s quite simply the best phone I’ve had. Looks good, nice and slim in the pocket, fantastic UI and the apps, well, that’t where this phone sticks out in front of the rest.
If you don’t have an iPhone, this post will either be of no interest to you at all or may ust convice you to get one.
It already comes with some great apps, like Google Maps But you’re not stuck with just that, of course, there’s a wealth of apps you have to pay for, but in these economic times, let me run through a “Top 5″ of the coolest free apps I’ve downloaded so far…
Flixter
Like movies? Fire up the Flixter movies app and you’ve got access to all the current and past cincema releases and DVD’s too.
But, like a lot of iPhone apps, it’s a just little bit more than what you’d initially expect. Of course you get a still picture, synopsis of the movie, the certificate rating and the credits, but you also get the trailer, in good quality video, and the cinema times. Best of all it uses location services to come back with the cinemas closest to you in ‘distance from you’ order. Nice.
Want to Google something on the move? Of course you do! Do you use the inbuilt iPhone browser, go to Google site and type in the search terms? No, of course you don’t; that’s the boring way.
You get the Google app, because it’s voice activated. You start the app and hold the phone up to your ear (you could of course type in the search term, but why would you?) it senses from the angle of the phone that you want to talk to it, then it uses voice recognition to search. The other good thing is it uses your current location with the search, so if you say, “Burger King”, it’ll find the one closest to you. OK, sometimes it’s not great at recognising what you say but hey, it’s cool.
Shazam
It’s been around for a while, but if you’ve never used Shazam before, this will knock your socks off. You ever been listening to the radio, or in a shopping centre, or a friend’s house and you hear some music and think, “oooh, what is that tune again?” (I won’t say pub-quiz, ‘cos that’s just cheating)
Well, if you have, Shazam is the app you’ve been waiting for. Start the app, let your phone listen to the music for about 10-15 seconds and it will come back and tell you what the tune is. It does this for free on a dat tariff (it used to charge you on old mobiles) and it even comes back with an iTunes links to purchase the tune if you so wish.
Wikipanion
You already know how good Wikipedia is. Well Wikipanion is Wikipedia, on the move, with output formatted for the iPhone. Not much more I can say than, “look up anything you want to know about”.
The cool thing about the Wiki app over just using the browser is that as you type in your search term, it dynamically comes back with suggestions on what you may be searching for and then when you finally go for it, the results are returned nicely formatted for the small screen, not a zoomed desktop browser format.
Sky News
If you’re a news junkie, you never want to be too far from what’s going on. With this app the headlines are instantly at hand and you can simply tap through to the Sky new story itself.
Again, the app wins over just using the phone browser because it formats the headlines and stories nicely for the small screen. One added benefit is that it supports embedded video too, so if the story has a clip, it’s there for you too, although a little bit slow to load and jerky if you are on GSM.
Some also ran’s on the free front that didn’t quite make it into the top 5:
Facebook – update your facebook page on the move
eBay – track your bids and sales
WordPress – update your blog
WordWeb – dictionary
Oh, and about three screens worth of games…
